Applications may terminate due to any number of threats, program errors, software faults, attacks, or any other suitable software failure. Computer viruses, worms, trojans, hackers, key recovery attacks, malicious executables, probes, etc. are a constant menace to users of computers connected to public computer networks (such as the Internet) and/or private networks (such as corporate computer networks). In response to these threats, many computers are protected by antivirus software and firewalls. However, these preventative measures are not always adequate. For example, many services must maintain a high availability when faced by remote attacks, high-volume events (such as fast-spreading worms like Slammer and Blaster), or simple application-level denial of service (DoS) attacks.
Aside from these threats, applications generally contain errors during operation, which typically result from programmer error. Regardless of whether an application is attacked by one of the above-mentioned threats or contains errors during operation, these software faults and failures result in illegal memory access errors, division by zero errors, buffer overflows attacks, etc. These errors cause an application to terminate its execution or “crash.”